Writing: a Process or a Product?
Will Eisenberg

As a jazz musician I find it difficult to play a song I haven’t fully studied. Memorizing the song’s chord changes and melody is one thing, but being able to improvise in a way that is interesting and serves the song is entirely different. Doing this well requires listening to many different artists and their unique takes on the tune. Typically, once I have found a version that I find particularly inspiring, I will break the solo down into fragments and learn each bit slowly and in all keys. Having done that for years, I have of course noticed certain trends that certain artists exhibit in their playing. For example, I once heard a line I loved from a John Coltrane solo over “My Favorite Things.” I learned the entire solo, and employed that line in my playing. Months later, I heard a saxophonist at a jazz concert use that very line in a solo. I was ecstatic to hear that he shared an affinity for that solo with me, and as I looked around excitedly, I noticed that about 20 other people seemed to as well.

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This idea that studying a certain work will enhance one’s understanding of the subject is far from groundbreaking, but it serves as an interesting way of looking at reading and writing. Writing is often taught in a way that compels students to start with  very little—or nothing—and end with a final draft with no real focus on the processes that take place between (save maybe one draft for peer-reviewing in earlier levels of education). Now, this is not an issue with one clear solution, and I do not consider myself capable of finding them all, so I will offer just one: teaching students to identify the intricacies of specific authors, and to use their findings as discussion points in class and in their own writing, could allow them to better appreciate the writing process and develop their voice along the way. As was once said by the composer Igor Stravinsky, “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” 

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There is an argument to be made for looking at a finished work as the entirety of the product. It is, after all, what the creator intended for the world to see. This idea is discussed at length in Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke’s piece: “Pre-Writing: The Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing.” Here, the authors list their conclusions on pre-writing and how it kick-starts the process as a whole. In one of the points, they discuss the “rhetoric of the finished word,” claiming that students are over-trained to be able to identify a piece of good prose from a bad one. This creates multiple problems. First, it instills in students the idea that a piece of writing can be inherently “good” or “bad.” It also puts too much emphasis on the final draft. It doesn’t consider the idea that the writing process can be a worthy product. A way that studying something like literature can help writers in their processes is by doing a deep dive on a given author, probably a prolific one or one with a long timeline. This will allow students, if prompted, to look for specific traits of a writer and follow them through their works and assimilate it into their DNA. 

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There are, of course, many English scholars who have devoted their lives to a field of work like literature that doesn’t prioritize the development of their skills as a writer. Edward Channing, in his article “A Writer’s Preparation,” discusses how learning one subject, namely literature, can be detrimental to a student’s development as a writer. He claimed that this would only improve one dimension of their writing. That literature can’t stand alone as a field of study is not quite the point that Channing is making, as he claims later in his piece that literature classes can still work students’ writing skills. Returning to my jazz analogy, many people listen to and love jazz who aren’t musicians. Just the same, there are many literature geeks who have never picked up the pen. Thus, it is up to the artist to utilize, as best they can, what they learn from what they study. Listening to a musical motif over and over will certainly get it in my head, but transcribing and analyzing it will enable me to understand it. To do the same with writing would be to recognize a mannerism in an author’s work and look out for it in future reading and employ it when writing. 

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Curricular changes far more drastic than what I have proposed here have been integrated before, but it would require a paradigm shift among students and teachers alike. Students generally want to read as little as possible, so sending them on a quest to find idiosyncrasies throughout the entire catalog of Charles Dickens may prove to be futile. The priority should not be for students to read as much as possible, it should be for them to connect as much as possible between readings. Sometimes, this means reading books cover to cover, and sometimes it means reading fragments of several different ones. Take, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is read in almost every English classroom in America, and it is likely taught in the same way that so many others are: read the book, write an essay on one of five prompts written by the teacher, get a grade, move on to the next book. I learned recently that there exists a published version of one of Fitzgerald’s first drafts of the book, and when I found it, I couldn’t help but question how an artifact like that could have enhanced my initial exposure to the book. Students could implement that draft in the classroom in numerous ways. Searching for and identifying the similarities between it and the final product would sharpen their understanding of the work as a whole, and finding which parts of the first draft Fitzgerald chose to keep, and discussing why he did so, would effectively develop their understanding of the structural elements of the story and of the English language. The way I see it, this method of instruction works best with as much classroom collaboration as possible. Yes, independent work would need to have its place as well, but discussing the readings would develop a deeper dimension of a student’s writing. A secondary proposal of mine is that the grading system be restructured in such a way that discussion, either in person or virtual, would be equally significant (or even more so) to individual essay writing. When developing an essay, a student can write 1000 incoherent words to reach a required word count, but a discussion will likely provoke them to prepare more salient points. David Bartholomae delves into the benefits of writing and interpreting it within a community in his piece: “Inventing the University.” He places significant emphasis on what are called “discourse communities.” 

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“Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (Miller, 605)

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By having regular classroom discussions about readings and writing, students are forming a discourse community—a community that will undoubtedly begin or advance students on the quest of finding their writing voice. Bartholomae includes a Basil Berstein quote in the introduction of his article: “… the text is the form of the social relationships made visible, palpable, material.” (Miller, 605) Shifting to a more discussion-heavy learning style would allow students to let the ideas of everyone in their class influence them and their writing.

The “rhetoric of the written word” will forever prevail in bookstores, libraries, magazines, and newspapers, but I invite teachers, students, and fellow readers to take a moment with whatever literature you may have in your hand, and appreciate the steps that were taken to put it there. 

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Works Cited:

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Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, 605-630.

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Channing, Edward T. “A Writer’s Preparation.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, 26-32.

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Rohman, Gordon, and Wlecke, Albert. “from Pre-Writing: The Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, 216-227.